James Axler - Wretched Earth

“Then why didn’t you lead us right to it without dicking around?” Drygulch asked.

The black-haired kid’s name was Johnny Hueco. He wasn’t one of them. He was a local who’d fast-talked the trio into hiring him to guide them into the busted-open redoubt, where he claimed he knew where to lay hands on a baron’s ransom in prime scavvie.

“Because we wanted to make sure nothing was going to jump on our backs when we walked all fat, dumb and happy past doors without checking what was behind ’em,” Lariat said. “Also because we wanted to make sure we didn’t miss anything worth hauling out of here. So step back off the trigger, Drygulch.”

“We got to hurry,” Johnny Hueco said, shifting his weight uneasily from foot to foot. “Things come out at night. Or in.”

That was why the bunch he’d been with when they’d stumbled onto this place, in what once was western Kansas and was now triple hard core Deathlands, hadn’t stripped the redoubt of its fabulous treasure. So he said. Something had jumped them in the dark. Only Johnny got out alive, and only because he was closest to the door.

And because whatever it was had been too busy eating his friends, his new companions reckoned. Not that they held it against him. Loyalty was as good as jack or ammo in the Deathlands. Because it was so rare.

When muties or monsters attacked, sometimes all you could do was bug out, and stickies take the slow. Like jack or ammo or white lightning, loyalty could run out.

“Lead on, then,” Lariat said.

Johnny led them back out into the broad main corridor. Their footsteps chased each other up and down the bare metal walls like small frightened creatures.

“Shouldn’t there be some kind of padding on the floors?” Reno asked. Their boot soles crunched on drifted dirt leavened with some kind of coarse material that didn’t seem quite like rock.

“Rats ate it,” Johnny said. “Hate rats.”

“I dunno,” Drygulch said. “Roast ’em just right, they can be mighty tasty. If they ain’t been eatin’ too much fresh shit or old chills.”

Reno licked his lips, suddenly remembering how ravenous he was. He hadn’t eaten since they broke camp in the watery, greenish-orange light of dawn.

It wasn’t just his wits and his packrat memory that had sustained him through a brutal childhood. There were the rats, too. Where people were, rats thrived. To the perpetually starving Hamster, the ones that had been feasting off shit and dead people tasted just fine.

“Here, what’s this?” Lariat said. She strode up beside Johnny.

They stopped. Lariat shone her flashlight at the wall, where a large white sign with red lettering had been bolted: Danger—Restricted Area—Authorized Laboratory Personnel Only.

Drygulch read the sign slowly. “Okay, what’s that mean?”

“It means we’re not supposed to be here,” Johnny said.

“I know that, ass face. I’m not stupe. I mean, what’s it mean here?”

“It means there’s valuable stuff inside,” Lariat said.

“What if there’s something living in there?” Reno asked, hustling to catch up. He didn’t think his friends would cut him out on any ace scavvie they found. He just didn’t like to leave too much to chance.

It was cold in here—as above, so below. Topside, the plains were dusted with light dry snow that eddied in the wind. Despite that, Reno’s skin prickled as if sunburned.

He hoped it wasn’t caused by rads from fallout from the old ground-burst crater a few miles west, drifting in through the cracks in the installation’s immensely thick concrete containment shell. They had no way of telling. Unless your skin started getting all mottled and your hair began falling out in clumps. Or you just went straight to the convulsions-and-bloody-shits stage.

With the first you might not die. With the second, you might not die soon enough. He’d seen both.

Drygulch held up his kerosene lantern. Next to the sign was a door that had been jammed partway open.

“Strike,” Lariat said. She poked her head through and shone her own flashlight around. “Looks like some kind of lab, all right.”

“I don’t know,” Drygulch said. “I don’t feel triple-good fucking with whitecoat stuff. Especially not from old days.”

“You think we’re in here scuffling like rats for rations and ammo?” the woman scoffed.

“Well, yeah. That and meds. Mebbe some blasters. Boots. I could use me some new boots.”

“Small-time. Mebbe you’re satisfied with that. Not me.”

Reno caught up. “I don’t think we’ll find much of that kinda stuff, anyway,” he said. “Place has seemed picked pretty clean so far.”

But Johnny Hueco was dancing from one disintegrating boot to another. “This is it!” he said. “It’s what I told you about.”

“No shit?” Drygulch said dubiously.

“Doesn’t look touched in here,” Lariat said, backing out.

“If there really was anything worthwhile in there, wouldn’t somebody have gotten to it by now?” Drygulch asked.

“Mebbe not,” Reno said. “Mebbe the door hasn’t been open long.”

“Why’d it be open now, Reno?” Lariat asked.

“Earthquakes,” he said. “Get a lot of seismic activity in this area. Some big quakes. Mighta shaken it open.”

Lariat studied him a moment longer. Her auburn hair hung to just above the wolf-fur-trimmed collar of her jacket, framing wide cheekbones and dark eyes with a touch of the Orient to them. Mebbe she wasn’t a beauty, Reno thought. Most men found her good-looking. She was queen of Reno’s world.

She’d made it clear early and emphatically that she was too good for the likes of Drygulch and Reno. They might be trail mates and partners, but no touchy-feely stuff.

Lariat nodded now. “Could be it. I’m going in. Who’s with me?”

“Might be bad animals in there, Lariat,” Drygulch said. “Muties even.”

She drew her .45 handblaster, pinching back the slide to confirm she had a round chambered.

“So, might be animals,” she said. “Right. I’m ready. Who wants to live forever?”

“Um, just a sec,” Reno said. The others turned, then followed his flywheel flashlight beam upward. The ceiling, higher in here than in the corridor, had buckled sharply downward. “So, if the concrete’s seriously cracked, the whole fucking thing might cave in on our heads at any minute.”

“It hasn’t fallen yet,” Lariat said blithely, and went in.

Eager as a hound pup, Johnny followed her. Drygulch sent an eye roll Reno’s way before he went on through.

Reno carried a Winchester Model 1897 12-gauge scattergun on a rope sling over his shoulder. A pump model with a hammer and a 5-round tube magazine, it had been old, Reno had read somewhere in an old scavvied magazine, even before the Big Nuke lit the skies with hell’s own light. At some point in the weapon’s long history the barrel had been sawed off a few inches past the end of the mag.

Transferring the flywheel flashlight from his right hand, which had seriously begun to cramp, Reno took the best hold he could on the shotgun’s grip and swung the barrel up. What possible good the weapon could do against a potential cave-in, the young man had no clue. He only knew holding it made him feel better.

“Okay, what’s ‘prions’ mean?” Drygulch was asking suspiciously when Reno entered the lab. He was peering at a cabinet stenciled prominently with that word, plus numerous danger symbols and scary messages. “I never heard of prions.”

There was a smell in there Reno couldn’t name. More than just cold metal and dust. Not like anything that had crept inside recently and died. And he knew that if anybody had died down here during the Big Nuke, in the hundred years and more that had passed, they’d have got their stinking done long since. But still, something made him think of death.